Windows – Can’t find IIS config file listed by appcmd

I'm managing a bunch of IIS 8.5 servers and I'm working on complying with security baselines.

My question is this: If I run a specific appcmd query on one of our IIS servers, I get the following:

C:\>appcmd list config -section:system.web/authentication
<system.web>
  <authentication mode="Forms">
    <forms requireSSL="true">
      <credentials>
      </credentials>
    </forms>
    <passport />
  </authentication>
</system.web>

C:\>

What I need to do is find the actual configuration file that appcmd is reading from here, so I can update the relevant section manually (updating using appcmd itself causes all kinds of problems). I can't find it. I've checked the following files so far:

• %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config
• %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config\machine.config
• %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config\web.config
• %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\web.config
• %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\machine.config
• %WEBROOT%\web.config
• %WEBROOT%\old application path\web.config
• new application path\web.config

I can't think of any other places to look. Most of those files don't even have a <system.web> section and none of them have the word "credentials" in them anywhere.

Where is appcmd reading from to generate the output above?

Edit:

I'm still looking into this, and just found the following here, which might be the answer:

Default Configuration

The following default credentials element is not explicitly configured in the Machine.config or root Web.config file. However, it is the default configuration that is returned by the application.
<credentials passwordFormat="SHA1" />